The Squeak unlocks the door, gives a perfunctory knock and enters regardless. I don’t care. There is nothing I would not do in front of her. I listen to her cross the room. Her shoes are sensible, crêpe-soled; she sacrificed style for comfort a long time ago. It is in fact her trolley that squeaks. She stops in front of me and I’m forced to drag my eyes away from my leaf. She is looking particularly unattractive today; her forehead is a mound of bumps and blotches and there is a cold sore at the corner of her downturned lip.

‘Morning,’ she says cheerlessly, handing me my medication, pouring me water from the institutional plastic jug that must have been transparent once but now is a filmy grey. The water is tepid and tastes of jug. I swallow the pills.

‘It hurts to swallow,’ I say. I don’t even recognize my own voice. I’m all raspy.

‘Well, it would, wouldn’t it, Connie,’ she says. She is standing, I am sitting, and my head comes up to her shoulders. She has dark circles under each armpit on the pale blue of her uniform. I myself am something of a sweater.

‘Perspirex. It works. For problem perspiration,’ I say. ‘You should try it. You can get it in Boots.’

She is immune to pretty much anything I say. Besides, she is half reading her Daily Mail, which sits on the trolley. She’s not meant to let me see newspapers. ‘And why would I take any tips from you, Connie?’

She’s such a cow.

‘You shouldn’t speak to the guests like that,’ I say.

‘You’re not a guest,’ she says, not unkindly, passing me another two blue pills, her attention still on her paper. She’s reading the cover story, which is accompanied by a photograph of a bushy-bearded bomber. Or maybe he’s a celebrity. I have to say I’m surprised how the fundamentalist look has really caught on. Since when did it become trendy to blow people up? Now I sound like my mother.

‘Is anyone bringing my mother to visit?’

She pauses, looks up from her paper and stares at me. ‘When are you going to stop playing dumb?’ she says, which obviously reminds her of something because she bends over, her ample thighs stretching her polyester trousers to the max, and produces a flimsy old laptop from the lower shelf of the trolley. ‘Dr. Robinson wanted me to give you this – she wants you to write it all down,’ she says, sighing with disapproval. She puts it on the little table beside me. ‘It’s fully charged.’

I look at the laptop and wonder if I can get online.

‘You can’t get online,’ she says. She likes to remove breaths of wind from scraps of sails.

‘No donkey porn then.’ I notice that I am feeling in quite good spirits today.